Today I came across this quote she made that is worth noting:

“This is one the major problems of old media. The illusion of presenting two sides of a story instead of just ferreting out the truth.”

“That rotten, traiterous [sic] piece of filth should be hung by the ankles from a lamp post and beaten by the mob rather than gaining a pulpit at ANY self-respecting news organization,” said one message. “You should be ashamed. Apparently you are only out for money and therefore an equally traiterous [sic] whore deserving the same treatment.”

Then Holt as if to brush off the citizen critics writes:

Kristol would not have been my choice to join David Brooks as a second conservative voice in the mix of Times columnists, but the reaction is beyond reason. Hiring Kristol the worst idea ever? I can think of many worse. Hanging someone from a lamppost to be beaten by a mob because of his ideas? And that is from a liberal, defined by Webster as “one who is open-minded.” What have we come to?

Then he gets down right patronizing when he adds:

This is a decision I would not have made. But it is not the end of the world. Everyone should take a deep breath and calm down.

Sitting in your position of power, Clark, you might not know it or feel it, but in this era of waterboarding etc. it is pretty damn tough to take a deep breath and calm down.

Here is what I would have done, insteading of retrieving probably one of the nuttiest letters to prove a point, I would have run all the letters they received. All 700 right here on the web, what does it cost? Almost nothing.

Instead Hoyt decides to treat 700 of The New York Times readers, dedicated enough to take a stand, as if they are little children, or worse nut cases, and worse still, apparently in his mind, liberal nut cases. 

 The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.

Being a resident of Georgia and the owner of citizenjournalism.org,  I felt obligated to provide the opposite view, which is in today’s AJC Op-Ed section.

 I was civil, but others on the Internet were less forgiving. Here is Dan Gillmor’s blog title: Needed: Regulation to Prevent Journalists-Turned-Professors from Embarrassing Themselves.  Rhetorica’s response emphasized free press and is also worth a read. TigerHawk takes the best nasty shot. But first, of course, read the unedited copy that I sent to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has the headline, at least online of “Citizen journalists: They don’t need to be regulated.” Here is the unedited copy:

As the owner of the URL CitizenJournalism.org, I feel obligated to respond to David Hazinski’s opinion piece yesterday about citizen journalism, in which he wrote: “The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.”   He doesn’t think the formerly passive news media audience members, who are now content producers, are very trustworthy. He adds: “Journalism schools such as mine at the University of Georgia should add courses to certify citizen journalists in proper ethics and procedures, much as volunteer teachers, paramedics and sheriff’s auxiliaries are trained and certified.” 

 I agree with him that journalism schools should offer training for citizens interested in the news media.. In fact, the Department of Communication at Kennesaw State University, in which I teach, is about to introduce a new concentration entitled: Journalism and Citizen Media. Although we might offer a Citizen Media certificate, I am far most interested in helping future journalists understand the power of citizen media involvement and totally opposed to “monitoring and regulating this new trend.”

 For example, mainstream media have been guilty of what Dr. Mercedes Lynn de Uriarte of the
University of Texas calls “censorship by omission.” The voices of the poor, the disenfranchised and minority groups often go unheard. Now citizen participation in the news media is an opportunity to get the disenfranchised heard in ways impossible in the past. Who is going to certify which of those voices is most trustworthy? Will it be the members of the journalism profession, who are 86 percent white and almost 100 percent middle class? I hope not.

Furthermore, you can be a great journalist without formal training. In 1996 former Washington Post reporter Betty Medsger did a national study of journalism education, entitled Winds of Change: Challenges Confronting Journalism Education. In her survey of relatively new journalists, those with less than 11 years experience, 27 percent said they had never studied journalism.

It gets better. Taking a 10-year slice of the major journalism awards and fellowships winners she found “the majority, sometimes an overwhelming majority” never studied journalism.” Here are her findings:
·  59 percent of print journalists who won Pulitzer Prizes never studied journalism;
·  75 percent of broadcast journalists who won DuPont Awards never studied journalism;
·  58 percent of journalists awarded Nieman Fellowships never studied journalism, and;
·  51 percent of journalists awarded Knight Fellowships at Stanford University never studied journalism.

Citizen journalism, which goes by many names including networked journalism, We Media, distributed journalism, and open-source journalism, is a direct outgrowth of the open-source software movement, about which Eric Raymond wrote in his book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” The cathedral being the old top-down model and the bazaar being the almost out-of-control street market model. Much to his surprise and almost everyone else’s the chaotic bazaar model produced better and more rigorous software than the rigid top-down model. In the end, this open bazaar form of citizen created journalism will produce a better informed public and a more rigorous public square.

Models will be formed, just as they were in the open-source software movement, which will filter out the crackpots, vandals and incompetents, and it will happen without a certification board. It will not be professional journalism pitted against citizen journalism, it will be a combination of both and that’s what I will be teaching my students. In other words, I will be teaching them about inclusion rather than exclusion and about freedom of speech and the power of the free press even if that press is a blog owned by a solitary individual publishing to the world.

The point is that the ready and largely uncritical embrace of the war narrative—in key realms of the public sphere—precluded the possibility of a serious public debate about other options.

Cunningham argues the need for a rhetoric beat. My guess is it will not happen in the mainstream media, especially in an era when we have massive job cuts. Might be too esoteric, but what if enough people interested in language pooled their money to make a rhetoric beat happen. It’s what I am trying to think through at the my Representative Journalism site.

Let’s start first with my Op-Ed piece today that was published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Congress can’t muzzle free speech: Condemning Petraeus critics, lawmakers ignore Constitution

The second is my letter to Romenesko with the headline: Witt blasts NYT public editor’s column on MoveOn.org ad .

 My premise in the first is that the U.S. Senate has injured the First Amendment of the United States Constitution by voting to: “strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.” If we have to worry about one of the highest legal branches of the Federal government “condemning” our use of free speech, then how free is that speech.

In my open letter to Clark Hoyt, the public editor of The New York Times, I say he is too worried about decorum at the expense of free speech.  As you might notice from the tone of my letter, I am more worried about free speech than I am about decorum.

It is time that all of us to speak out now, and help to put the brakes on the trend to attack free speech via condemning its speakers when we don’t like what we hear.

I was hoping to have a Representative Journalism site up and running at which we all could vet the idea over the next few months; it’s a little late, but will be coming soon. Here is the kernel of the idea which I will be freely revealing in much greater detail in the coming weeks:

Representative Journalism is a term I am coining to mean journalism that represents the interests of well defined, highly engaged groups or networks of people, by providing them high quality news and information that addresses their passions or interests — and for which they are willing to pay. The Representative Journalism blog will provide a how-to approach to build these small interest groups and link them into larger journalism networks.

Representative Journalism is community based, but with community broadly defined, ranging from a community of interests to a geographical community to a socio-economic community. There are no limits to community types. Each will be self defined by its own Representative Journalist and the people who comprise that community. It can be as lofty as a group with a passion for, let’s say, Constitutional Law or as ordinary as a group interested in public service delivery systems including garbage collection and fixing potholes. It can reach out to explain the world’s ecological systems or be as parochial as writing about the life of birds in northwestern Georgia . It can concentrate on the Great Books or romance novels. It could focus on women’s rights or nursing mothers, and yes, of course, there is crossover in many of these issue groups as will be explained as the idea unfolds.

The approach is a radical switch in how journalism is practiced and financed, so the first reaction to it will be expressed via red flags, and that is good. My aim is to anticipate and answer those red flag issues to ensure high quality journalism, that is, in fact, better than the way mainstream journalism is practiced today. Mostly, though, it will be built on the best practices and ethical considerations of traditional mainstream journalism.

I am looking to post my ideas in an open-source context because as I once wrote at Romenesko I believe academics, critics, the industry, journalists and citizens can produce “ideas for the future of journalism that will guarantee its rightful place in a functioning democracy.” I am hoping Representative Journalism will be one new way of conceiving what journalism’s future might be like.

In developing this idea, I started out thinking big. This can be a national movement and indeed it will work best if it were. On the other hand, I am very certain that it can and will be used on a limited basis and might even save some journalism jobs, including, perhaps, yours, or your students’ or your employees’.

I am free revealing my ideas here because I want to do my little part to save journalism. In return I am hoping you, the people who read these ideas, critique them, add to them or present your own. When the new Representative Journalism site is up and running, it will be much more interactive and friendly than what we have here.

In open source software development, someone comes up with an idea for a program. He or she starts writing the program. Then releases early and often each time knowing full well it will have bugs. Then people who want to use the program, report the bugs, while at the same time hackers jump in and write pieces of programming to help fix the bugs. And sometimes the users and hackers are the same people. By the way, in open source programming hackers are the good guys. So that’s what I will be doing I will be talking about bits and pieces of my ideas here and will be putting them more fully on an adjoining wiki. As an open-source developer, you will be able to add your comments or even go to the wiki and make changes to the more developed copy. It will be up to you decide how involved you want to get.

Every few days I will be putting up more materials. The next Representative Journalism post on is own site, hopefully ready in a week or two, will give information on what the financial model might look like.

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Indeed on my way to work this morning listening to NPR, I heard how McCain, an early front-runner, is drifting behind and Fred Thompson is moving ahead and well….you get the idea.

If you have some ideas on better election coverage, drop in at Rosen’s PressThink.org and post it in the comments session.

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You might remember that the Spokesman-Review used a forensic computer expert, posing as a teenage boy on the Internet, to verify that Spokane Mayor Jim West was trolling online for young men. I ran an interview with Steve Smith about that ethically debatable decision, and after wards thought it would make a great ethics case study. Well, the case study is finished and soon, a couple of weeks, a month? It will go live here at the PJNet.org as part of the Restoring the Trust project that was underwritten in part by the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. The case study is aimed for journalism classroom use. We are just about ready for a few test runs, so if anyone wants to give it a try. Let me know.

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“Trust is the element that allows the Journal to sell advertising at extremely expensive rates,” said one close observer of the paper. “It’s that trust that advertisers mention most often as the reason they want to be in the Wall Street Journal. If any of that trust is undermined it would have a negative impact on advertising.”

Article adds:

In 2006, the Journal took in $1.25 billion in ad revenue, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

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